How deep can you dig this hole for yourself, MS? The specific complaints may differ, but the way they're approaching this is so much like 2006 Sony that it's like these guys haven't learned a single damn thing from history.

My guess is that Eusis is right, and that the price point will be the most important question to a fair number of consumers. And whether they think $500 is a fair price will be the determiner.

If sales don't go well, MS will drop their price down at some point after the initial release, but making changes to the things people like us are actually upset about will be the last, desperate act they'd try.

The fun thing is with the Kinect bundled I don't see how they could drop the price without underselling losing money. The kinect 2 actually is an impressive bit of hardware and the dev and production costs for it have to be fairly high. Since the One is said to not work without it, it sounds like they'd have a hard time doing that, or have to patch the system to work without the kinect and then drop it to lower the price.

They're almost certainly already selling the XBox One either at a loss or with low profit margins.

They can't go cheaper without killing the mandatory kinect, and even then they still might be stuck at 500.

Logged

o/` I do not feel joy o/`o/` I do not dream o/`o/` I only stare at the door and smoke o/`

Selling systems at a loss is hardly unprecedented, though. Despite the $600 price tag Sony was losing $200 per PS3 when it launched. Was that a good strategy or not I don't know but if you want to shove something expensive down consumer's throats (in Sony's case it was blu-ray...) then it's not totally unreasonable to take a hit.

People actually wanted a blu-ray player though. The Kinect is... far more niche.

Very niche. My wife and I got one to play games she might like together. We play the sports dart game once or twice a year. That's it. Even she thought everything else was gimmicky shit and she's a Facebook 'gamer'.

People actually wanted a blu-ray player though. The Kinect is... far more niche.

They also probalby predicted it'd have value as a game medium, and they were right, though any game that needs that space usually also needs to sell millions and it'd be safer to hit both systems, and so it was only later on that it really became important when they finally started going "fuck it" and released multi-disc 360 games on a frequent basis.

So there have been unboxings of the new Xbox 360 superslim and apparently it's missing some pretty basic AV outputs. It's either shitty old composite or full HDMI, with no support of component cables or optical audio. It's a weird decision. I know they want to push HDMI for the Xbox One, but composite cables are still pretty high quality and there are a lot of people out there using them.

And then there's the optical audio issue. Personally, when I bought my receiver support of the audio part of HDMI was still fairly rare. I don't know if this has changed now (I'm not really in the market for a receiver), but the way it works is that it supports HDMI video, but basically just as a pass-through. It doesn't have the DSPs to split the audio and video signals, so for audio support you have to plug in a separate optical audio cable. This is something I considered a minor inconvenience at most. Every device I've ever worked with that does HDMI has the ability to output HDMI video with optical audio. The quality of optical audio is just as good, so all it really meant is that you needed another cable.

But if somebody with a receiver like mine (which I was under the impression was quite common when I got my receiver, maybe that's changed...) wanted to get a 360 superslim their choices are either no audio (well, they could go straight to the TV speakers I guess, but it wouldn't use your home theater system...) or shitty composite video with only two channel audio. That's ridiculous. I guess your third option is to buy a new receiver that supports HDMI audio, but good receivers are expensive.

The 360 superslim is literally the first device I have ever heard of that can do HDMI video but not optical audio. I have to wonder if that's a sign of things to come. Is the Xbox One going to be like that too? I suspect so, and likely because of the way they're pushing the TV input stuff. They want everyone to use all-HDMI because it simplifies the inputs. The problem is, not everyone is using all-HDMI and rather than trying to adapt to the needs of consumers MS seems to expect consumers to bend over backwards for them.

The outputs are all different on the new model (and it's not like they switched to standard ports either...) because...why not...

It's probably a proprietary cable you have to buy afterwards. I know my xbob came with a composite cable with some RIDICULOUS fucking huge connection to the xbob, so maybe it's something similar in this case. Honestly, no system has ever come with anything above a standard composite cable set.